Do thumbnail previews help users make better relevance decisions about web search results?

ABSTRACT

We describe an empirical evaluation of the utility of thumbnail previews in web search results. Results pages were constructed to show text-only summaries, thumbnail previews only, or the combination of text summaries and thumbnail previews. We found that in the combination case, users were able to make more accurate decisions about the potential relevance of results than in either of the other versions, with hardly any increase in speed of processing the page as a whole.

REFERENCES

• 1: Czerwinski, M., van Dantzich, M., Robertson, G., and Hoffman, H. The Contribution of Thumbnail Image, Mouse-over Text and Spatial Location Memory to Web Page Retrieval in 3D. Proc. INTERACT '99, 1999, 163--170.
• 2: Shaun Kaasten , Saul Greenberg, Integrating back, history and bookmarks in web browsers, CHI '01 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, March 31-April 05, 2001, Seattle, Washington [doi>10.1145/634067.634291]
• 3: Allison Woodruff , Andrew Faulring , Ruth Rosenholtz , Julie Morrsion , Peter Pirolli, Using thumbnails to search the Web, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.198-205, March 2001, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/365024.365098]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Search process

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
          Subjects: Human factors

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
search engine, thumbnails, web search